Ethan Hawke goes unfiltered about his career and the one he imagined

Ethan Hawke has said his career didn’t turn out the way he once imagined, and that he had pictured himself as an action star.

In an interview with GQ’s Zach Baron for One More Question, Hawke, 55, spoke about his upcoming survival thriller The Weight. He said he wanted to make an adventure film before he got “too old.”

Hawke said that after Training Day in 2001, he thought he would do a lot of action movies. “But when I was younger, I also thought I’d be in a lot of comedies,” he said. “I thought everything would be different somehow. And how it is is fine — interesting, of course.”

He said he and his wife and producing partner, Ryan Hawke, had talked about finding a great action movie. They teamed up with Padraic McKinley to get the script made. “In five minutes, I will be too old to be the hero in an action movie. I probably already am,” he said. “But I wanted to try to do it, and I feel really proud of the movie.”

Asked if he had to mourn the role age plays in his choices, he said he tries not to think that way.

Hawke also looked back on his early fame. He said he never took pride in it until it was gone, when posters of his films hung in college dorm rooms across America. “Wish that still was [the case], but you have to kind of embrace what is,” he said. He added that women now tell him at his kids’ soccer games that they had his picture on their wall.

He said he likes that he has worked across many genres, from horror films like Sinister and The Black Phone to Before Sunrise and Dead Poets Society.